column number and Unicode characters

[roxma]

你|好

Where | is the cursor position, I got col(.) == 4

I know that the first character "你".encode('utf-8') is b'\xe4\xbd\xa0' , has a length of 3, which is why the next character 好 gets the col(.) as 4

But from the user's perspective, the col(.) should be 2 for h or l motion keys.

Is this intentional? Things get tricky for completion plugin when Unicode character is present.

[fmoralesc]

It is intentional, since col() is supposed to return the byte, not the visible column.

Moving to virtcol() doesn't help, though, I think, because that returns the position of the last column a character occupies. In the example above, it returns 2 when the cursor is above 你 and 4 above 好, but I think it would be more consistent if it returned 1 and 3.

As far as I can tell, there is no function to get the character position in a line, as opposed to the byte or the visible column it might occupy.

[justinmk]

see #68 (comment)

As far as I can tell, there is no function to get the character position in a line, as opposed to the byte or the visible column it might occupy.

It was added a few months ago in Vim (and merged to Nvim), see :help strgetchar, :help strchars, :help strwidth, etc.

[fmoralesc]

@justinmk what about the behavior of virtcol()? Do you think it is sensible as is?

[justinmk]

In the example above, it returns 2 when the cursor is above 你 and 4 above 好, but I think it would be more consistent if it returned 1 and 3.

Seems weird, but as long as it's consistent it doesn't matter, right? It's funny that :set ruler agrees with you. It's too late to change virtcol(), though.